The Annie E. Casey Foundation

Success begins with a good foundation

Annie E. Casey Foundation

The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) helps kids, strengthens families, builds stronger communities, and increases access to opportunity for all. One of our longest partnerships, our work with the Foundation continues to be anchored in mutual respect and shared responsibility.

What we did

Industry

Happy Cog really brought a strategy and a sense of helping us achieve our goals as a foundation. It wasn't just ‘we can provide this many hours of design,’ ... they presented a partnership from the start.

—John Hodgins, Annie E. Casey Foundation

John Hodgins describes what it was like working with Happy Cog on the Annie E. Casey Foundation website redesign.

Content-heavy websites demand a purposeful and sustainable content strategy. The net result of our work is a website that organizes the Foundation’s content in easily navigable and digestible ways, as well as a design that reflects their storied legacy. Collaborative working sessions ensured the project ran smoothly, and that all decisions mapped back to the initial project requirements. Content workshops drove a new informational hierarchy, tagging system, and a host of content revisions. User research led us to change the site’s content hierarchy, making a meaningful difference in how people find information they need, as well as aid in the discovery of new, useful content.

The Foundation's many initiatives are sortable by how they are implemented and who they help—kids, families, communities, and leaders.

We also built out the backend publishing system. Part of this included our implementation of a more thorough and accurate tagging system and taxonomy, coupled with a robust search functionality to access information intuitively through a custom-built integration between ExpressionEngine (the chosen CMS for this project) and Apache Solr™.

We used data visualization as part of the visual language to help communicate the foundation’s national and local impact.